The cover of the March 1997 Fortune magazine asks, "Is Your Family
Wrecking Your Career?" Inside is an article headed "Oh, Quit Whining and Get
Back to Work! It's heresy to say so, but let's say it anyway: Sometimes your job
is more important than your kid's Kodak moment." The article describes the
demands that top-ranked corporations place on working couples trying to raise
children and make time for their families. The culture of the most successful
corporations, according to the article, is one in which devotion to the company
comes first, before family. The message to Fortune's CEO readers seems to
be that successful corporations must be anti-family.

The anti-family culture reflected in this pro-business magazine is something
that millions of people must buck everyday as they work to make their families
healthy and keep them intact. In spite of politicians' talk about "family
values," the pressures on working families have grown more intense in the last
decade in many different ways.

Capitalists would have us believe that the pressures on families result from
economic necessity. This is not true. From 1947 to 2000 the productivity of
American workers has almost quadrupled. (http://www.bls.gov/opub/rtaw/pdf/table24.pdf). We could produce more now than we did then if our families sent only one
parent to work for twenty hours a week or each parent to work for ten hours. The
"Leisure Society" that was foreseen in the '60s is just as feasible economically
as the massive "downsizing" and overtime work that capitalists prefer. The
necessity driving the attacks on the family is not economic but political. It
results from capital's need to control working people by attacking the most
fundamental bonds of solidarity among human beings.

WHY IS CAPITALISM HOSTILE TO FAMILIES?

Families are a social institution within which the values of selfishness and
competition B the bedrock values of
capitalism B are not viewed as
appropriate. In healthy families, the important things like emotional support,
shelter, medical care and food, are shared according to need: not sold, but
given freely. People work hard in families, not for pay but out of love and
solidarity. The self-serving values and behavior that are viewed as normal when
engaged in by corporations, if practiced inside a family are seen as sick.
Corporations are built on greed and competition: buy low and sell dear, move the
factory to where labor is cheaper, bring in scabs to break strikes, pit people
against each other, sell tobacco to kids. To capitalists, anything is OK as long
as it makes money. The corporate leaders who engage in the most vicious
practices are frequently rewarded with the highest salaries. Healthy families
are a challenge to capitalism. The countless things we do as family members,
caring and providing for one another, making family events from an evening meal
to a large family reunion, helping each other in an emergency, giving advice and
hugs, listening sympathetically, enjoying each others' company, and even
squabbling and arguing to resolve conflicts or giving valuable negative feedback
- all these things we do everyday in our families have a significance which
often goes unnoticed. They are efforts to make our little corner of the world
the opposite of the world of buying and selling. Capital's hostility to families
is part of a broader hostility to the values of working people generally.
Working class culture values solidarity and equality over selfishness and greed.
It's a culture that says you shouldn't cross a picket line and if you do you're
a scab. Working class struggles have always drawn much of their strength from
family ties. Working class family values are an active force against capitalist
power. The great sit-down strikes of the '30s, the valiant struggles of Hormel
meatpackers and Staley workers and Detroit newspaper strikers in the 80's and
90's, and the strikes by janitors and grocery store workers in more recent
times, have all depended on family ties and values of solidarity and equality
forged in the families of working people.

HOW CAPITALISM ATTACKS FAMILIES

One key form of capitalist attack on the family lies in a process called "commodification,"
in which capital seeks to undermine the natural forms of human interaction in
all spheres of life and replace them with commercial relations. In particular,
capital strives to turn loving family relations into mere "commodities"-
services bought and sold in the marketplace. By reducing important aspects of
our humanity to commodities, capital creates an image of human "freedom" in
which people are "freed" of all social commitments and all social norms and
morality. The ruling elite hope in this way to undermine bonds of solidarity and
reduce people to solitary individuals, isolated and powerless. The owning class
is trying to do more thoroughly to the family what it has long done to people at
work. Corporate owners don't want labor to be a social activity that people
engage in collectively for shared goals--a process which makes people very
conscious of their power--but rather a commodity the owners can purchase by the
hour. By purchasing our labor, capital seeks to take control of the labor
process and product out of our hands. Capital tries to chop working people up
into pieces of "usefulness"--our ability to turn a screw or punch a number or
fry a hamburger--so that we ourselves can be treated like commodities: cheap and
easy to replace. In recent years the impact of this process on specifically
family-related aspects of our lives has been accelerating.

"OUTSOURCING" MOM

Corporations used to hire only men for jobs that paid enough to support a
family. This demeaned women and undermined family solidarity by making it
impossible for husbands and wives meaningfully to share outside work,
child-raising, and housework. But capital's "reform" of the unequal roles of men
and women in the family is a further attack. In the last 30 years, capital has
outsourced or automated millions of "family wage" industrial jobs and cut the
pay of others, thereby forcing working class wives into the labor market to
compete for the remaining low-paid jobs, all in the name of "freedom for women."
Now families are stressed even more, since both parents typically have to work
at least one job, and sometimes two or three, leaving little time to devote to
children or relaxation, to community service, or to anything else. Additionally,
capital is attacking mothers by trying to commodify everything about them that
makes them valuable members of a family.

Having driven mothers of infants and toddlers to take jobs, capital now
forces them to purchase mothering as "day care" from a growing industry whose
employees are often themselves mothers of small children. (This is
particularly ironic in the case of mothers on welfare forced into day-care
jobs.)

After forcing people to work such long hours that they don't have time to
prepare their own meals, capital is using restaurant chains, like "Boston
Market" specializing in "home-cooked, family-style" meals, to move
hard-pressed moms (and dads) from their own homes, where cooking was an act of
love, to corporate kitchens where it's wage labor.

Capital is moving women out of their own homes to be maids in wealthier
homes working for a growing housekeeping industry.

Corporations are making
Grandmother's wisdom a "wholly owned subsidiary" by hiring women to give
advice on child-rearing and other domestic questions to their employees. The
more corporations undermine families, relocating people away from family and
friends, the more "Corporate Grandma" is needed.

Capital even puts a mother's womb on the market with the growing
phenomenon of paid "surrogate mothers," whose motherhood and humanity is
commodified as a womb put out for hire.

DOWNSIZING DAD

Capital is challenging the simple truth that a child's relation with his or
her biological father is valuable. The image of fathers has come under
increasing attack, as more TV sit-coms feature fathers as incompetents ("The
Simpsons" and "King of Queens" are current examples) and movie plots
involve abusive fathers (The Breakfast Club, Affliction, and Daredevil
to name only a few.) Many courageous women have long been forced by
circumstances to raise their children alone. Now, however, as celebrities like
Camryn Manheim (Ellenor of TV's hit lawyer show, "The Practice") choose to
have and raise babies without a father (both in real life and as her fictional
character, in the case of Manheim), Hollywood sends the message, "Who needs a
father?" Academics deride fatherhood in books like Feminism, Children, and
The New Families, in which Susan E. Krantz dismisses the notion that "two
parents are necessary for the well-being of a child" and argues that "the role
of the father is overemphasized." Academic "experts" are trying to split off
Dad's "male presence" from the rest of him and make it just another commodity.
Writing in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, Alan J. Hawkins and
David J. Eggenbeen state, "Men may be important to children's healthy
development, but biological fathers can readily be replaced by other adult men."
(Cited in David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America, p. 80) Stepfathers may
be nice people, but the claim that children have no need for a close relation
with their biological father cannot bear the weight of common sense or
scientific scrutiny.(For example, a study of 17,000 British children born in
1958 showed that children in step-families "experienced far worse outcomes than
did children who grew up with their two biological parents." Blankenhorn, p.
191). The "any male will do" notion is ideologically driven by capital's desire
to commodify men. This commodification of men is quite apparent in states like
Massachusetts, where the "progressive" agenda is well advanced, and divorce
courts aggressively separate fathers from their children. (The author has
personal experience with Massachusetts' family courts.) Courts routinely
restrain fathers from seeing their children, sometimes for years, without due
process, evidentiary hearings, or the rules of evidence that are accorded
accused criminals. The courts' attitude is that a father's only important
relationship to his children is financial, so there's no real loss if a loving
father is barred from seeing his children.

SPLITTING UP MOM AND DAD

Liberal politicians and advocacy organizations have increased the rate of
divorce in the United States enormously by enacting policies based on the
premise that fatherhood is not important. The result has been a host of social,
psychological and economic problems suffered by children and caused by their
fatherlessness. [http://www.childrensjustice.org/fatherlessness1.htm]
A major cause of the increased divorce rate has been the introduction of
"no-fault" divorce coupled with the policy of family courts of awarding the
mother solely, instead of both parents jointly, exclusive physical custody of
the children (unless the mother is grossly unfit) and requiring the father to
pay child support sufficient for the mother and children to maintain their
former standard of living, even though it impoverishes him (courts often garnish
the man's paycheck directly.) Once rare, divorce is now common and two thirds of
divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women. [http://health.discovery.com/centers/loverelationships/articles/divorce.html
] The state has essentially told women, "Feel free to leave your husband
whenever you feel like it, no matter how trivial the reason, because the state
will make sure you keep your children and your husband's income." The result is
that in millions of broken families the state has moved in to assume the role of
head of the family and "parent" to both the mother and father. All concerned
B the mother, the children and the
father B have become more directly
controlled by and, in the case of the mother and children, more dependent upon
the state, and therefore less able to stand up against the capitalist class. It
would be difficult to imagine a policy better suited to covertly undermine
marriages and families.

The liberal attack on marriages would not be able to succeed, however, were
it not for the helpful role of the right-wing "pro-family" and pro-capitalist
religious leaders and their ilk. Together these groups play a "damned if you do
and damned if you don't" routine that makes people feel hopeless about improving
the situation. The right-wing religious leaders point to the evils of the
liberal agenda on families but they insist that the only alternative is a
patriarchal society where women must submit to men. Some women and some men may
support this view but most men and women want relationships based on equality.
But no mainstream leadership articulates what most people want in this regard.
Although it is economically perfectly feasible, what leader today calls for
all wages to be raised enough, and corporate practices to be changed, so that a mother
and father can each work a half-time job (or only one parent work outside the
home full time, if they prefer) and raise their children comfortably on the
income? With no opposition except from the right wing, which calls for a
patriarchal nightmare for women, the elite get a free pass to carry out their
liberal attack on our families.

MAKING CHILDHOOD "LEAN AND MEAN"

In healthy families, parents love and protect their children as special
people. They value them for themselves, not as a means to an end. Capitalism, in
contrast, uses children as little workers and consumers, and tries to replace
relations of love with marketplace transactions. Corporations flood Saturday
morning TV with shows designed to manipulate children to measure their parents'
love by the toys and "Happy Meals" they buy. For capitalism, parental love is a
cash transaction that passes through the Toys 'R Us cash register. Millions of
children overseas work in factories preparing goods for the U.S. market. In the
U.S., children are increasingly told that childhood is a time to prepare
themselves to meet the needs of corporations. Corporate leaders call for
increased standardized testing in public schools, so that we can "better compete
with Germany and Japan." Capital insists that children be graded from "A"
through "F" - to teach them to compete against each other, and to sort them like
cuts of beef so that corporations in the market for labor will know what "grade"
of employee they're hiring. Corporate "education reformers" view our children
not as people who should receive a well-rounded education, but rather as
commodities to be sorted,
graded, and prepared for sale to corporations.

HOMOSEXUAL FAMILIES AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

In recent years the capitalist class has aggressively promoted the idea that
homosexuality is as good and natural and moral a basis for a family as
heterosexuality, and that anyone who disagrees with this view is a bigoted
"homophobe." Television promotes homosexual families with lesbian characters
like Carol and Susan on "Friends," Melanie and Lindsay on "Queer as Folk,"
and the characters on Showtime's lesbian series "The L
Word." Judges in Massachusetts have legalized homosexual marriage. While they
attack traditional families, corporations increasingly treat homosexual couples
as if they were married. The Massachusetts Department of Education encourages
students to form "Gay-Straight Alliances" [http://www.doe.mass.edu/hssss/GSA/Intro.html] to eliminate any stigma associated
with homosexuality, despite the fact that the current Republican governor, Mitt
Romney, purports to be a solid "conservative" on the issue.

Marriage and sexuality are not just about procreation, and to the extent that
children are not involved there would be no reason for legislation to meddle in
these private affairs between individuals. But since marriage and sexuality do
often lead to procreation, society has a responsibility to decide what to
promote and what to discourage in this otherwise private sphere of life. The
concerns that people have about laws regarding marriage and society's attitude
towards homosexuality are largely related to the impact of these things on
children. Most people believe that the best thing for children is to be raised
by their real mother and father in a strong and loving family. An important
reason people disapprove of homosexuality is because it is impossible for a gay
couple to make this kind of family. This is why parents don't want the schools
teaching their children that it makes no difference if they marry someone of the
same sex or the opposite sex. Most people rightly believe in tolerance when it
comes to civil rights for homosexuals, but they don't believe that society
should endorse the idea that a homosexual relationship is just as good or
healthy a basis for a family as a heterosexual one.

Capital attacks people for
feeling this way, and calls them bigots, because it likes the direction in which
homosexuality moves society. In capital's ideal world where everyone is an
isolated individual, sexuality is not a social relationship connecting parents
with children, but just a way people use each other, and children are just
something you buy. If two men want a child, then they can rent a womb and buy an
egg from a surrogate mother. Why not? It's just a business transaction the way
all human relationships ought to be. Or if two women want a baby, just buy some
sperm. Why not? Fatherhood is just a commodity like toothpaste or clothing. A
professor of law testifying before Congress described sperm donors as "providers
of gametes," and offered the legal opinion that "A consumer's right 'to make
contracts with providers of gametes' cannot be prohibited or limited except to
assure that such contracts 'are knowingly and freely entered into.'" (Blankenhorn,
p. 179) This is the capitalist idea of Paradise, in which people are no more
than their constituent parts: a womb, a source of sperm, a "male presence," a
child support check, a "day care provider." No longer will children's mothers
and fathers be unique and beyond price.

HOW CAN WE DEFEND OUR FAMILIES?

The media are full of very sophisticated anti-family messages, which can come
from both the right and the left. Liberals denigrate the value of families in
which
children are raised by their real mother and father, and they sometimes suggest
that such families are often patriarchies with abusive fathers. Conservatives often call for "family values"
in which women are subordinate to men and inequality prevails. Neither liberal
nor conservative views reflect true family values of equality and commitment to
each other. There are immediate steps we can take to defend families. One step
is to reject anti-family propaganda for what it is. Another is to recognize the
attack families are under and to see that it is part of capital's attempt to
control ordinary people. Fully to defeat the attack on our families, and to
create a truly pro-family society, we need to build a revolutionary movement
that challenges capitalism, its values, and its right to rule society. The
revolution we need is one which aims to extend to all of society the kind of
relationships we work so hard to build within our families.